Glossary

This is a glossary of terms relating to cron events in WordPress and WooCommerce.

Terms

Cron

A time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems.

WP-Cron

A WordPress feature that simulates a system cron. It handles scheduled tasks within WordPress.

Cron event

A scheduled task in WordPress that triggers a cron hook at a certain time. Sometimes referred to as a cron job.

Cron job

Either refers to a cron event in WordPress, or a Unix system cron job

Cron hook

The name of the action hook that is triggered when a cron event runs.

Cron schedule

The frequency at which a cron event is set to recur.

WP Crontrol

A plugin for WordPress that allows you to view and control what's happening in the WP-Cron system. The documentation on this website is provided by and applies to WP Crontrol.

Cron Control

The system which runs WP-Cron at scale on WordPress VIP.

Cavalcade

The system which runs WP-Cron at scale on Altis Cloud.

Action Scheduler

A library for queueing and batch processing background tasks in WordPress, used by WooCommerce and other plugins.

Ambiguity

Note: There can be some ambiguity around what an "action" refers to in WordPress. An action technically refers to one of the callback functions which are called when a hook is fired (ie. it's a listener in event-driven architecture terms), but you will often see it used to refer to the hook name itself due to the unfortunate naming of the do_action() function.